Pastoral (2 page)

He rubbed his hand across his face, yawned, stretched, and went to the bathroom.

Half an hour later he was getting on his bicycle to ride around the ring runway to dispersal. He rode slowly with one hand in his pocket, savouring the freshness of the morning. He passed various Wellingtons upon their little concrete bays. One had a gaping, jagged hole at the trailing edge of its starboard extension plane, that had removed a portion of the aileron and put the flap permanently half-way down. He glanced at it casually, without much interest, as he passed. It was a big job. Nobody was doing anything about it yet.

He came to his own Wellington, R for Robert. The ground crew were working on it; the fitters had stripped the port engine of its cowling, and there was somebody in the cockpit. Marshall got off his bicycle and laid it down upon the grass, and strolled over to the port engine.

“Morning,” he said. “How do we go?”

One of the fitters said: “You got an oil leak. Filter casting’s cracked. Did you know?”

Marshall shook his head. “Pressure was all right. Might have been five pounds down. Is it bad?”

The man went to the engine and wiped the casting with a dirty rag; immediately the new oil showed the crack. “You were nearly dry on this side,” he said. “Not more’n
two gallons in the tank.”

Marshall looked again. “Did something hit that?” he asked. “Or did it just go?”

“Just went, I should say.” The man wiped it again. “I don’t see any mark.” He glanced up at the pilot. “Is that right, it was Turin?”

“That’s right.”

“Much stuff about?”

“Not much. Seen anything of Sergeant Pilot Franck this morning?”

“He’s inside, sir.”

There were several people in the fuselage: Gunnar Franck, and the corporal rigger, and one of the men from Vickers. Marshall swung himself in and said: “What’s this in aid of?”

Franck turned to him. “There is little holes,” he said. “In the bomb doors and the underneath of the rear fuselage, and the tail also. I have thought that it was the rats, maybe.”

Marshall said: “Very likely. Couldn’t have been anything else.” He bent with them to examine the damage, which was no more than superficial, and heard what the technician proposed to do about it. “Strong teeth the little muggers have,” he observed, fingering a buckled duralumin bracing of the geodetic.

Gunnar said: “Also, they have strong stomachs. I have found the droppings.” He opened his hand and showed three tiny, jagged fragments of shell-case.

“They’re not well,” said Marshall.

Phillips came down the fuselage from the rear turret. Marshall said: “Everything all right your end?”

“Okay. I never fired a round all night, bar testing. I’ll check up with the target this afternoon, soon as I can get it.”

They got out of the aircraft and stood beside it in the warm sunlight. Before them stretched the field, crisscrossed with the wide runways, empty, idle, and still. Phillips said: “None of our lot bought it, did they?”

Marshall shook his head. “It was a bit of cake.” He turned from the machine. “I’m going up to Coldstone Mill this afternoon to try and get a pike,” he said. “You coming along?”

The sergeant shook his head. “If I go out, I’ll go to the river.” He meant, to fish for roach. “But I got a date for the pictures to-night, so I don’t suppose I’ll go. Wouldn’t hardly be worth it.”

The pilot said: “I’ve got a twisted wire cast that I got in
Oxford, and a single wire cast, and a sort of artificial gut cast—thick stuff. Which would you use?”

“With them plugs and the little rod? I’d use the single wire.”

“Not the gut?”

“I dunno. I never used that fancy sort of stuff for spinning. If there’s a fish there and he likes the bait, he wouldn’t bother about wire or gut.”

“They don’t notice?”

“Naow—not pike don’t. I knew a chap one time, in Elvington it was, used to use brass picture-wire, fishing for pike. And he got plenty. Tain’t like as if it was roach.” He paused, stooped under the fuselage and fingered a little rent in the belly fabric; then he straightened up again. “You should do all right this afternoon,” he said. “They like the sunny days.”

He glanced up at the pilot. “Will we be doing a flight test to-morrow?”

“If the riggers are through.”

“They should be through with all that lot this afternoon. Them patches can have a second lick of dope first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll be out here at half-past nine,” the pilot said. “We’ll try and get the flight test off before dinner.”

The sergeant said: “Okay. I’ll tell the boys.”

Marshall picked up his bicycle and rode off slowly down the runway in the direction of the mess. The air was very still and fresh, the sky pale blue, the distance hazy. He passed the Wimpey with the damaged starboard wing. There were men about it now; as he rode slowly past, Pat Johnson, the pilot, walked in front of it.

Marshall, riding at a walking pace in the warm sun, said conversationally: “You’ve made a bloody mess of that.”

The other grinned. “Got to have a new wing.”

“What about a noggin?”

“Right. I’ll be along in a minute.”

Marshall parked his bicycle and went up to his bedroom. The batwoman had done the room and made his bed; he laid out all his fishing gear upon the counterpane and looked it over. Rod, reel, plugs, traces, fishing-bag—all were there, ready to be taken in a moment after lunch. He stood a little, fingering them; then went down to the ante-room.

Johnson was there; he pressed the bell and ordered a couple of pints of beer. Few of the pilots drank anything but beer,
partly from inclination and partly from economy. Marshall said: “Have any trouble getting her down?”

The other shook his head. “She came in all right. She was all right once I put the flaps down. But she was a swine to handle all the way home. One flap was out and wouldn’t go back. We had to fly her all the way, in half-hour spells. Then when we put the flaps down to land, she was all right.”

The beer came, two tankards on a tray borne by a white-coated W.A.A.F. “I looks towards you,” said Johnson.

“I catches your eye,” said Marshall.

“What are you doing to-day?”

“Going fishing.”

“Bet you don’t catch anything.”

“No takers.”

They had been together at Hartley aerodrome for nearly a year. At one time both had been novices of golf; they had laboured together round the Hartley course counting it a superior achievement to hole out in less than eight. Marshall had tired of it and turned to fishing; Pat Johnson had gone forward to a handicap of fifteen in the local tournament. In the evenings they had formed the habit of finding amusement together; they were friends. They were much the same age, and from very much the same social class. Marshall had worked for a year before the war in an insurance office in Holborn; Pat Johnson had been apprenticed to an estate agent in Croydon. Both had developed into seasoned and reliable pilots of large aircraft.

Johnson said: “Coming down to the ‘Black Horse’ after dinner? Take you on at shove-halfpenny.”

“If it’s not raining.”

“It won’t rain to-night.”

The “Black Horse” was one of the two pubs in Hartley Magna, tacitly dedicated to the air crews; other ranks went to the “Swan.” The “Black Horse” was rather more than a mere country pub; in peace-time it had been something of a road-house, with a snack-bar that still sold sandwiches. It was the only social centre within walking distance of the aerodrome; for the wider life it was necessary to catch the occasional bus for Oxford, fourteen miles away, or jump a ride if there was transport going to the city.

The pilots went and had their lunch together. A masterful, grey-haired woman of about forty-five, Flight Officer Stevens, came and sat by Marshall. “Morning,” she said.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

Marshall knew what was coming; he had had this one with the Officer-in-charge-W.A.A.F. before. “Really?” he said innocently. “What’s that?”

“Your cup of tea. I cannot have the girls wasting their time bringing you up cups of tea in the middle of the morning. They’ve got their work to do, and that’s not it. If you want elevenses you must come down and get it.”

Marshall said: “It was only a little cup …”

“It was the biggest we’ve got on the station. She put two spoonfuls of sugar in, too, which isn’t allowed, and she’d have given you a third if I hadn’t caught her. Next time I’ll put her on a charge.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I will. You see if I don’t.”

Marshall dropped the subject, uncertain if the officer was aware that he had got his cup of tea or not. Instead, he said: “If I catch a fish this afternoon can I have it for lunch tomorrow?”

Pat Johnson said: “That’s what they call an academic question.”

Mrs. Stevens said: “If it’s one tiddley little roach, you can’t. If it’s a fish that will feed several people, or a lot of fish, you can.”

“What do you call a lot of fish?”

“Three or four pounds.”

“That’s hitched his wagon to a star all right,” said Mr. Johnson.

They went on with the meal in silence. The grey-haired Flight Officer felt out of things beside these inconsequential young men. They had no right to make her feel … old, but they did. She could no longer put herself alongside twenty-year-old youth. That afternoon while they were at their games, or flying, she would be writing to her husband in the Western Desert, somewhere near Benghazi. She wrote every other day. The war had brought him two promotions, so that he was now Air Commodore Stevens, and that was splendid; but it had broken up their home. They had had a little house at Chislehurst which had been convenient when he was at the Air Ministry. Three years before, they had put the furniture in store, and shut the door, and left that little house. He had gone to Egypt, she had gone into the W.A.A.F.s, the two children had been sent to boarding-school. The furniture, all that they
had, was burnt in the London blitz; when the war ended they would have to start all over again. In the meantime she must live with young men and young women twenty years her junior, lonely and out of it. She knew they took her for a dragon. She did not want to be a dragon, which was why she had allowed the girl Beatrice to take Marshall the cup of tea. But she could never get alongside them; she knew now that she never would. She was too old.

Marshall got away from her as soon as he decently could, and drank a quick cup of coffee in the ante-room. Then he went up to his bedroom; in five minutes he was on his bicycle riding out of the camp.

Coldstone Mill was a tall, factory-like building set in the countryside upon the River Fittel. A lane crossed the river on a stone bridge of two arches; a hundred yards below the bridge the mill stood by the weir, and below that again was the millpool. It was a broad, gravelly pool, scoured wide by the mill-stream and the weir, overhung by trees at the lower end. It stood in pasture fields, very sunny and bright.

The pilot left his bicycle at the mill and went down to the pool. For a time he walked slowly round the edge trying if he could see a fish; presently he sat down and began to assemble his rod. He fitted the little silvery reel and threaded the fine line, and chose the little trace with the single wire, as the rear-gunner had advised him. He spread out his collection of seven plugs upon the flat canvas of his bag and studied them thoughtfully. Finally he chose a desperate-looking parody of a small fish, more like a septic banana than a fish, and hooked it on the trace. Then, standing up, he began to cast over the pool.

He spent the next ten minutes clearing over-runs upon his reel. He was not a very skilled performer.

He fished for the next hour, supremely happy. The rhythm of the cast, the antics of the plug, delighted him; the warm sunlight, and the very fact of handling a well-designed instrument, made him content. The rush of water from the weir made a murmur that drowned the sound of the many aircraft that were in the sky, except when they passed closely overhead; the water slipping past over the green weed and the gravelly shallows was a thing remote from any of his duties.

He paused after an hour or so, and sat down on the ground, and lit a pipe. He took off the septic banana and fitted in its place a peculiar whirligig designed to represent a lame mouse taking swimming exercise, alleged to be very attractive to a
pike. He was still sitting smoking when he turned to a step behind him.

It was Gunnar Franck, carrying his roach-pole and his little stool, on his way down to the quieter reaches of the river. “Phillips, he say you have come here,” he said. “Goes well?”

“Very well,” said the pilot. “Marvellous afternoon, isn’t it?” He lifted the little steel rod. “Have a crack with this.”

The Dane took the rod doubtfully, made an ineffective cast, and produced a tangle of line massed and jamming the reel. He handed the rod back to Marshall. “I shall go catch a roach,” he said. “When I come back, he will be disentangled, yes?”

The pilot began to unravel the line. “Just in time for you to muck it up again,” he said. “Getcha!” He glanced up at the Dane. “None of those bits hit any of the tanks, did they? I was thinking of that just now. I ought to have looked to see.”

“I looked.” Above their heads, in a bare elm tree, there was a sudden flap and clatter, and a pigeon flew off. They raised their heads to watch it. “I looked, but there was nothing. Only the bomb doors and the belly and the fabric underneath the tail. It is no damage, really.”

Marshall said: “It was just as you said ‘Bombs away.’ Just after that, wasn’t it? We were running-up too long.”

“One minute only. Sixty-five seconds. I had the stop-watch running,” said Gunnar.

“We’ll have to get it shorter. I’d hate to get shot up by the Eyeties. I should die of shame.”

“Of shame?” The Dane wrinkled his forehead; there were still points of English manners that eluded him.

The pilot said: “Did you see that pigeon? This place is stiff with them. You haven’t got a gun?”

Gunnar shook his head. “Sergeant Pilot Nutter, he has a rifle. A little gun, his own. Two-two.”

“Bring it out with you next time you come and let’s see if we can’t get one or two. They’re bloody good eating, pigeons.”